The ubiquitous digital file: A review of file management research

Abstract

Computer users spend time every day interacting with digital files and folders, including downloading, moving, naming, navigating to, searching for, sharing, and deleting them. Such file management has been the focus of many studies across various fields, but has not been explicitly acknowledged nor made the focus of dedicated review. In this article we present the first dedicated review of this topic and its research, synthesizing more than 230 publications from various research domains to establish what is known and what remains to be investigated, particularly by examining the common motivations, methods, and findings evinced by the previously furcate body of work. We find three typical research motivations in the literature reviewed: understanding how and why users store, organize, retrieve, and share files and folders, understanding factors that determine their behavior, and attempting to improve the user experience through novel interfaces and information services. Relevant conceptual frameworks and approaches to designing and testing systems are described, and open research challenges and the significance for other research areas are discussed. We conclude that file management is a ubiquitous, challenging, and relatively unsupported activity that invites and has received attention from several disciplines and has broad importance for topics across information science.

What's in people's digital file collections?

“…Hundreds of studies have covered various topics in FM (Dinneen & Julien, ), like searching and navigating to files (Bergman, Tene‐Rubinstein, & Shalom, ; Teevan, Alvarado, Ackerman, & Karger, ), file sharing (Capra, Vardell, & Brennan, ), and developing augmentations to FM software (Fitchett, Cockburn, & Gutwin, ). To investigate the common PIM activities of storing, organising, and retrieving (or exploiting) digital items (Jones et al, ; Whittaker, ), many studies have characterized the artefacts produced by FM activities: people's digital collections (i.e., files and folders).…”

“…The task of managing digital files, also called file management (FM), is ubiquitous in computing: at home and at work, people create, download, copy, name, rename, organize (or leave unorganized), delete (or not), share, navigate to, and search for digital files and folders (Dinneen & Julien, ). The result of such activities are collections of files and folders people personally manage for personal, professional, and educational purposes.…”

Out of sight and out of mind: Bookmarks are created but not used

“…There are also limitations to our study that promote questions for future work. Our participant pool was homogeneous and more diverse populations should be explored, given that age and job characteristics may influence PIM retrieval (Bergman et al, 2019a; Capra and Perez-Quinones, 2006; Dinneen and Julien, 2020; Khoo et al, 2007; Zhang and Hu, 2014). For example, knowledge workers have larger file collections than students, with different distributions of file types and different organizational strategies (Dinneen et al, 2019; Dinneen and Julien, 2019, 2020).…”

Why do some people search for their files much more than others? A preliminary study

“…Bergman et al, 2010Bergman et al, , 2014Bergman et al, , 2019a. This subfield is a rapidly growing area of research, as evidenced by a recently published review that identified over 230 publications on file research (Dinneen and Julien, 2020).…”